Review: ‘Extra Shapes’ Balances Movement, Sound and Light, Times Three

Sometimes the music for a dance overpowers the movement; sometimes lighting steals the show. In other cases dancing itself outdoes everything else. In “Extra Shapes,” which had its New York premiere on Friday at the Kitchen, the choreographer DD Dorvillier gives equal weight to all three elements — movement, sound and light — assigning each to a colored strip of carpetlike flooring. Pink is for sound, white for light, brown for movement. The analogous image offered in publicity materials — a slice of Neapolitan ice cream — turns out to be entirely accurate.

This experiment may sound drier on paper than it is in practice. “Extra Shapes,” part of the Kitchen’s series “From Minimalism Into Algorithm,” plays with perception in subtle and rewarding ways. The same 17-minute sequence, repeated three times, reveals new details on each viewing, in part because the viewer’s perspective keeps shifting. Ms. Dorvillier seats the audience on all four sides of the rectangular space. With each iteration we rotate 90 degrees, so that everyone sees the work from three sides and misses it from one, a completed picture left to the imagination.

I started on the long side closest to the pink stripe, where speakers of assorted sizes were arranged symmetrically. These emitted Sébastien Roux’s quizzical electronic score — an aural parade of buzzes, whooshes and bleeps — while Thomas Dunn’s enchantingly capricious lighting filled the central corridor, its eye-popping changes, like a plunge into deep red, punctuating more understated moments. Three dancers, each in a monochromatic ensemble of tights and a loose-fitting top — Ms. Dorvillier in gray, Walter Dundervill in purple, Katerina Andreou in bright blue — occupied the far strip with Ms. Dorvillier’s spare, vigilant choreography.

That choreography traveled restlessly from side to side (or front to back, depending on your vantage point), making the most of its confines. The trio skittered back and forth like fencers; walked in slow, molten motion; and broke into a skipping pattern with corresponding turns of the head, falling into and out of unison. At one point, as if to highlight the fallibility of sight, they all wore thick-rimmed glasses. Even when the lights dimmed, obscuring what we could see, they continued moving.

The work’s structure is simple enough that, on second and third viewing, you can anticipate what’s coming. What begin as surprises evolve into comforts. Yet just when I felt as if I had seen everything, something new would appear, a seemingly rogue movement or trick of light. Had it been there all along?